Tyler Hicks

In 2014, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography for his coverage of the massacre at the Westgate Mall in Nairobi, Kenya.

He came to The Times as a contract photographer in Kenya in 1999, photographing news stories in East and West Africa. After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Mr. Hicks went to Afghanistan for The Times and reached Kabul as the Northern Alliance liberated the city from Taliban control. He has returned to Afghanistan yearly and continues to document the conflict there.

As a freelancer for The Times, Mr. Hicks lived with a Kosovar family while covering the Balkan conflict. Two years later, with an end to the conflict, he went to Africa to cover the escalating war between Eritrea and Ethiopia.

Mr. Hicks moved to North Carolina, where he was a staff photographer for three years at The Wilmington Star-News. During this time, he photographed personal projects in Haiti, Albania and Kosovo. Moved by the atrocities he saw in Kosovo, Mr. Hicks left his job to cover international news.

In 2001, Mr. Hicks received the ICP Infinity Award for Photojournalism for coverage of Afghanistan, as well as other awards, including World Press and Pictures of the Year and Visa Pour L’image in Perpignan, France. In 2009, Mr. Hicks was part of the Times team that won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He was named Newspaper Photographer of the Year by Pictures of the Year International for his work in 2006.

On March 16, 2011, Mr. Hicks and three other journalists were taken hostage in Libya, on assignment for The Times covering the revolution. After six days in captivity, Mr. Hicks and his colleagues were released. On Feb. 16, 2012, in Syria, Mr. Hicks was with Anthony Shadid, The Times’s Beirut bureau chief and twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, when Mr. Shadid died, apparently from asthma. Mr. Hicks carried Mr. Shadid’s body across the border to Turkey.

Mr. Hicks graduated in 1992 with a B.A. in journalism from Boston University. He was born in São Paulo, Brazil. He now lives in Nairobi, Kenya. But he’s seldom home.